Rangle Roulette: How a Donut Improved Our Culture

Here at Rangle, we’re growing - and fast! An average Monday almost always means a handful of new faces joining us. While growth is incredibly exciting, it does pose a challenge in maintaining the level of community and connectedness we strive for. We have Friday Socials, tea sampling, lunch and learns, guilds and more, but it can be difficult to break out of the norm and meet people outside of your team. So how do you encourage a human connection instead of just transactional Slack messages and a quick hello as you pass through the kitchen?

Rangle Meets Donut

One of our Scrum Masters, Daniel Kang, noticed that as we scaled it was becoming more and more difficult for Ranglers to interact regularly and meet new people. When chatting with his partner and friend about this problem, they both mentioned their offices use a bot for Slack called Donut to foster an improved sense of community. The bot randomly pairs up participating co-workers through a dedicated Slack channel and encourages them to pick a time to take a walk, grab a coffee or you know, a donut. Daniel loved the idea of Donut and felt it was a product that would truly create positive connections and best of all, it was all in person. Thanks to his discovery we’ve been using Donut since March in what we’ve dubbed Rangle Roulette.

How Donut Has Impacted Rangle

Rangle Roulette quickly became one of our most popular Slack channels with over 50% of the company currently participating. Once you join, our Donut bot will pair you up every two weeks with a new partner and create a Slack conversation to help facilitate your outing. As an additional twist, we’ve asked that Ranglers share a photo of their Donut experience in the channel. This started off simply enough with casual selfies, but things escalated quickly. Ranglers got creative and didn’t just stick to coffee or a walk along the water - some people went for haircuts, bowling, and even an iconic Eiffel tower selfie (yes, the actual Eiffel tower - not the MacBook photobooth one!)

Donut has been an incredible way for us to keep our community close as we grow and not only learn about each other one on one, but also through the experiences shared in the channel afterwards. This effort has enabled an understanding of the wide variety of roles at Rangle and the unique personalities and backgrounds of our team members. A member of our finance team may not have the daily opportunity to connect with a designer or even our CTO if not for a product like Donut. August represents six months of reclaiming the human connection here at Rangle and another step towards an interconnected community outside of Slack.